Woody Herman | Biography & History | AllMusic google+ Artist Biography by Scott Yanow A fine swing clarinetist, an altoist whose sound was influenced by Johnny Hodges , a good soprano saxophonist, and a spirited blues vocalist, Woody Herman 's greatest significance to jazz was as the leader of a long line of big bands. He always encouraged young talent and, more than practically any bandleader from the swing era, kept his repertoire quite modern. Although Herman was always stuck performing a few of his older hits (he played "Four Brothers" and "Early Autumn" nightly for nearly 40 years), he much preferred to play and create new music. Woody Herman began performing as a child, singing in vaudeville. He started playing saxophone when he was 11, and four years later he was a professional musician. He picked up early experience playing with the big bands of Tom Gerun , Harry Sosnik , and Gus Arnheim , and then in 1934, he joined the Isham Jones orchestra. He recorded often with Jones , and when the veteran bandleader decided to break up his orchestra in 1936, Herman formed one of his own out of the remaining nucleus.

The great majority of the early Herman recordings feature the bandleader as a ballad vocalist, but it was the instrumentals that caught on, leading to his group being known as "the Band That Plays the Blues." Woody Herman 's theme "At the Woodchopper's Ball" became his first hit (1939). Herman 's early group was actually a minor outfit with a Dixieland feel to many of the looser pieces and fine vocals contributed by Mary Ann McCall , in addition to Herman . They recorded very frequently for Decca, and for a period had the female trumpeter/singer Billie Rogers as one of its main attractions. By 1943, the Woody Herman Orchestra was beginning to take its first steps into becoming the Herd (later renamed the First Herd). Herman had recorded an advanced Dizzy Gillespie arrangement ("Down Under") the year before, and during 1943, Herman 's band became influenced by Duke Ellington ; in fact, Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster made guest appearances on some recordings. It was a gradual process, but by the end of 1944, Woody Herman had what was essentially a brand new orchestra.

It was a wild, good-time band with screaming ensembles (propelled by first trumpeter Pete Candoli ), major soloists in trombonist Bill Harris and tenorman Flip Phillips , and a rhythm section pushed by bassist/cheerleader Chubby Jackson and drummer Dave Tough . In 1945 (with new trumpeters in Sonny Berman and Conte Candoli ), the First Herd was considered the most exciting new big band in jazz. Several of the arrangements of Ralph Burns and Neal Hefti are considered classics, and such Herman favorites entered the book as "Apple Honey," "Caldonia," "Northwest Passage," "Bijou" ( Harris ' memorable if eccentric feature), and the nutty "Your Father's Mustache." Even Igor Stravinsky was impressed, and he wrote "Ebony Concerto" for the orchestra to perform in 1946. Unfortunately, family troubles caused Woody Herman to break up the big band at the height of its success in late 1946; it was the only one of his orchestras to really make much money.

Herman recorded a bit in the interim, and then, by mid-1947, had a new orchestra, the Second Herd, which was also soon known as the Four Brothers band. With the three cool-toned tenors of Stan Getz , Zoot Sims , and Herbie Steward (who a year later was replaced by Al Cohn ) and baritonist Serge Chaloff forming the nucleus, this orchestra had a different sound than its more extroverted predecessor, but it could also generate excitement of its own. Trumpeter/arranger Shorty Rogers and eventually Bill Harris returned from the earlier outfit, and with Mary Ann McCall back as a vocalist, the group had a great deal of potential. But, despite such popular numbers as Jimmy Giuffre 's "Four Brothers," "The Goof and I," and "Early Autumn" (the latter ballad made Getz into a star), the band struggled financially. Before its collapse in 1949, such other musicians as Gene Ammons , Lou Levy , Oscar Pettiford , Terry Gibbs , and Shelly Manne made important contributions.

Next up for Woody Herman was the Third Herd, which was similar to the Second except that it generally played at danceable tempos and was a bit more conservative. Herman kept that band together during much of 1950-1956, even having his own Mars label for a period; Conte Candoli , Al Cohn , Dave McKenna , Phil Urso , Don Fagerquist , Carl Fontana , Dick Hafer , Bill Perkins , Nat Pierce , Dick Collins , and Richie Kamuca were among the many sidemen. After some short-lived small groups (including a sextet with Nat Adderley and Charlie Byrd ), Herman's New Thundering Herd was a hit at the 1959 Monterey Jazz Festival. He was able to lead a big band successfully throughout the 1960s, featuring such soloists as high-note trumpeter Bill Chase , trombonist Phil Wilson , the reliable Nat Pierce , and the exciting tenor of Sal Nistico .

Always open to newer styles, Woody Herman 's bop-ish unit gradually became more rock-oriented as he utilized his young sidemen's arrangements, often of current pop tunes (starting in 1968 with an album titled Light My Fire ). Not all of his albums from this era worked, but one always admired Herman 's open-minded attitude. As one of only four surviving jazz-oriented bandleaders from the swing era (along with Duke Ellington , Count Basie , and Stan Kenton ) who was still touring the world with a big band, Herman welcomed such new talent in the 1970s as Greg Herbert , Andy Laverne , Joe Beck , Alan Broadbent , and Frank Tiberi . He also recorded with Chick Corea , had a reunion with Flip Phillips , and celebrated his 40th anniversary as a leader with a notable 1976 Carnegie Hall concert. Woody Herman returned to emphasizing straight-ahead jazz by the late '70s. By then, he was being hounded by the IRS due to an incompetent manager from the 1960s not paying thousands of dollars of taxes out of the sidemen's salaries.

Herman , who might very well have taken it easy, was forced to keep on touring and working constantly into his old age. He managed to put on a cheerful face to the public, celebrating his 50th anniversary as a bandleader in 1986. However, his health was starting to fail, and he gradually delegated most of his duties to Frank Tiberi before his death in 1987. Tiberi continued to lead a Woody Herman Orchestra on a part-time basis but it never had the opportunity to record. Fortunately, Herman was well documented throughout all phases of his career, and his major contributions are still greatly appreciated. Woody Herman — Free listening, videos, concerts, stats and photos at Last.fm not your granddaddys razzmatazz big band Woodrow Charles Herman (May 16, 1913 – October 29, 1987), better known as Woody Herman, was an American jazz clarinetist, alto and soprano saxophonist, singer, and Big band leader. During his lifetime, he led some of the most exciting big bands of the twentieth century. His bands changed styles and approaches to jazz but still managed to keep their musical integrity.

Herman was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As a child he worked as a singer in vaudeville, then became a professional… read more WOODY HERMAN, BANDLEADER, DIES AT 74 - NYTimes.com WOODY HERMAN, BANDLEADER, DIES AT 74 Published: October 30, 1987 Woody Herman, a musician from Milwaukee who led one of the most varied, durable and successful of the big bands, died yesterday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 74 years old. Mr. Herman was suffering from congestive heart failure, emphysema and pneumonia, according to a hospital spokesman. Mr. Herman was admitted to the coronary intensive-care unit there on March 26 after suffering from effects of medication taken for high-altitude sickness during a tour through Colorado and Utah, his manager, Tom Cassidy, said. Over the course of a career that lasted half a century, Mr. Herman led a succession of ensembles - generally calling each one his ''Thundering Herd'' - in a wide spectrum of popular music from blues to bop to rock and beyond. The songs most closely associated with Mr.

Herman include ''Woodchoppers' Ball,'' ''I've Got the World on a String,'' ''Apple Honey,'' ''Summer Sequence,'' ''Four Brothers,'' ''Caldonia'' and the group's theme song, ''Blue Flame.'' Mr. Herman conducted the band, played clarinet and saxophone, and sang in a light baritone voice that was warm and musical and slightly bluesy. ''Year by year, there have been certain basic consistencies in Woody Herman's so-called Thundering Herds,'' John S. Wilson wrote in a 1980 review for The New York Times. ''The level of musicianship has been high, the age level has been low, the turnover in personnel has been frequent and, primarily because of the last factor, some of his orchestras have been better than others.'' ''Although Herman's instrumental expertise was considerable, his essential importance was as an organizer,'' Michael James wrote in the New Grove Dictionary of American Music.

''His rare ability to assemble and sustain bands notable both for their solo and collective qualities grew especially clear in the late years of World War II, when his group typically combined brilliant improvisation with exuberant and incisive ensemble playing (this was the band for which Stravinsky composed his 'Ebony Concerto'). The harmonic procedures of bop influenced Herman's next orchestra even more deeply, confirming his freedom from jazz's current sectarianism.'' Financial Problems Mr. Herman had had financial problems in recent years. In August, he was threatened with eviction from his Hollywood Hills, Calif., home because he could not pay the rent. He had lost the house in a 1985 Internal Revenue Service auction to recoup $1.6 million in back taxes assessed against him. He had continued to rent from the man who bought it. Mr. Herman's fans and friends raised more than $70,000 toward the tax debt and to pay $4,600 in back rent. More than 1,200 jazz enthusiasts, including many musicians and singers, attended a tribute to Mr. Herman last week in West Los Angeles. Proceeds were given to the Woody Herman Tribute Trust Fund. Mr.

Herman was the model of the nomadic, hard-working professional musician, an unflappable craftsman who played for many thousands of people each year, at black-tie supper clubs or small-town dances, in Carnegie Hall or a rock auditorium. ''Every night a new town,'' he told an interviewer in 1968. ''Only time we get to settle in for a while is when we play Las Vegas, in one of the lounges, for a couple of weeks twice a year. The rest of the time, we have to keep moving. And we move. You know that.'' 'Boy Wonder' Woodrow Charles Herman was born in Milwaukee on May 16, 1913. While still a child, he appeared in a vaudeville act as ''The Boy Wonder of the Clarinet,'' and he made his first record, entitled ''Sentimental Gentleman From Georgia,'' at the age of 16. He studied at the Marquette University School of Music for one year, then moved to California, where he joined the Tom Gerun band as featured singer and instrumentalist.

In 1934, he joined the Isham Jones band; when the group broke up in 1936, Mr. Herman used its leading sidemen as a nucleus for his own orchestra. The resulting ensemble was called ''The Band That Plays the Blues'' and Mr. Herman took the name literally, playing and recording many blues-influenced selections. In 1939, ''Woodchoppers' Ball,'' based on a simple, infectious blues riff, became a great success; it remained the band's most requested number for almost 50 years. After some changes in personnel -the bass player Chubby Jackson joined the group in 1943, the arrangers Neal Hefti and Ralph Burns, the tenor saxophonist Flip Phillips and the trombonist Bill Harris signed on in 1944 - the group, now known as the Thundering Herd, became celebrated for the energy, precision and high spirits of its playing. Played Stravinsky Work Having heard that Igor Stravinsky enjoyed the group's music, Mr. Herman commissioned him to write a piece for the Herd.

The result, ''Ebony Concerto,'' was first performed at Carnegie Hall in 1946, to mostly unfavorable reviews. ''I think it's a complete gem, a work of art,'' Mr. Herman said years later. ''It's now being used as an academic piece in music schools throughout the country. But we had no more right to play it than the man in the moon had. For Stravinsky it was a challenge to write for this ridiculous combination of instruments. He had no desire to write jazz or anything like it and the work should never have been judged a jazz piece.'' Mr. Herman disbanded his original ensemble in 1946, but founded a second Herd the following year. This group included such splendid improvisers as the baritone saxophonist Serge Chaloff and the tenor saxophonist Stan Getz. It was one of the most daring of the big bands, peppering its commercial sound with elements of bop. ''The Herds kept coming,'' George T. Simon wrote in his book ''The Big Bands.'' ''The Third followed the Second, the Fourth followed the Third, and so on. In the early 60's, he was fronting still another Herd.

Don't ask me what number this one was. All I know is that it too was great, one of the most startlingly original outfits I'd ever heard.'' Added Amplified Sounds In the late 60's, Mr. Herman and a new, electrified ensemble played on a triple bill with two rock bands at the Fillmore East; the appearance was poorly received by both audience and critics. But Mr. Herman continued to play amplified music, combining it with the traditional big-band sound. In 1976, members of several Herds joined Mr. Herman and his current band at Carnegie Hall in a celebration of his 40th anniversary as a bandleader. In 1986, he released an album entitled ''Woody Herman and His Big Band 50th Anniversary Tour.'' Wherever the band would play, it was inevitably asked for a performance of ''Woodchoppers' Ball.'' ''I've been sick of it for 20 years,'' Mr. Herman once said. ''But it's been such a big number for us that I really shouldn't knock it.'' He is survived by a daughter, Ingrid Reese of Hollywood Hills, and two grandchildren.

Photo of Woody Herman (Camera Press) Jazz Profiles: Woody Herman: The Early Herds ’ Leader of the Band: The Life of Woody Herman, New York Oxford , 1995, pp. 56-57]: “For all his success, according to Woody, Isham Jones was always talking about "quitting the business." There have been any number of musicians-and other artists, for that matter-who have abandoned careers at their peak, including Rossini, Sibelius, and later, another clarinet-playing bandleader, Artie Shaw. We can only speculate that Jones, who, like Shaw, hated audiences, simply had had enough of the business. Aside from the money he had already accumulated, there was much more that would come willy-nilly in royalties from his considerable catalogue of songs. The ASCAP logging of radio performances of his songs alone assured him a life of ease. Woody always insisted that, for all his musical sophistication, Jones was essentially a country boy. Woody said, "He bought this ranch a few miles outside of Denver , and, oh, he had books of instruction, and he set up a great plant for turkey raising, and I don't know how many eggs he bought.

It takes a fantastic amount of care, particularly in a climate of that sort. He sent a brother out there to oversee it and hire people and run it." Thus, a year after the Goodman breakthrough at the Palomar, in the summer of 1936, while the band was in Tennessee, Isham Jones, only forty years old, gave his musicians notice. In 1940, when his memory of the incident was comparatively fresh, Woody described how Jones did it: "It was in , Tennessee , that he called us all into his room. He was very simple and straightforward about it. 'I've got a ranch near Denver ,' he said. 'I'm going there to write music and take it easy. We've had a good outfit, and it was nice while it lasted, but I'm retiring. We're breaking up.' He paid us off, rather nicely, too, shook us all by the hand and wished us luck. And we were in Knoxville without jobs. "Most of us were ready to pack it in and look for other jobs, but there were those of us who felt that we were a pretty good outfit, and that we ought to stick together and keep on being a pretty good outfit.

It takes a long time for musicians to 'work into' each other, and it seemed a crime to break up our now-excellent outfit." A small group of the musicians, comprising Woody, Saxie Mansfield, flugelhorn player and arranger Joe Bishop, bassist Walt Yoder, arranger Jiggs Noble, and a violinist and arranger named Nick Hupfer, whom Woody had known in Milwaukee, held a series of meetings. Woody had always admired the Ben Pollack band. When Pollack retired, some of the men from his band decided to stay together in a co-operative, with singer Bob Crosby, Woody's erstwhile San Francisco roommate, as their elected leader. There was another precedent for a co-operative in the Casa Loma orchestra. Woody and his friends decided to follow the pattern, forming their own group, with members holding shares in the band. The Isham Jones Juniors had recorded for the Decca label, and Woody had been doing studio work for the company. He quickly arranged a contract with Decca. Two or three of the other musicians joined the Ray Noble band at the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller in New York .

The remaining six men - Yoder, Mansfield, Bishop, Herman, Hupfer, and arranger Gordon Jenkins - discussed which of them should be the leader. Jenkins said in later years that the discussion centered on himself and Woody, but Jenkins got an assignment to orchestrate a Broadway show and finally the men elected Woody their nominal leader because of his wide show-business background, though he was the youngest among them-twenty-two years old. Jenkins contributed a number of arrangements, which, Woody said, “were more or less gifts, because we couldn't afford them." Where the discussion that led to Woody's election as leader occurred is unclear. Woody said in a 1940 interview, "We argued about it all the way from Knoxville to New York , and by the time we hit the big town, we were Woody Herman and the Band That Plays the Blues." In New York , the men began auditions to find seven more musicians to make up a complement of twelve. Woody at last had his own band, even if he was only an elected leader.

..." “But to return to Woody Herman, the years 1936 to 1944 were for the Herman band a lengthy (and often economically precarious) period of growth and search for stylistic identity. Ironically, it was the orchestra's exceptional versatility that hindered it in readily finding a large sustaining audience. It excelled in not one but a number of stylistic areas and was unwilling to abandon any one of them, thereby undoubtedly fragmenting its potential audience. "The band that played the blues" also did very well with romantic ballads (especially those by the excellent songwriter-arranger-pianist Gordon Jenkins), also with dance numbers, Dixieland-style instrumentals, even "novelty" tunes, on which Herman and the band lavished a high degree of musical skill and entertainment know-how - again the twin legacy of his own vaudeville background and Isham Jones's philosophy of treating all manner of material with respect and high craft. In all of these eclectic endeavors Herman managed to keep commercialism to a minimum, more so than most bands of the period, including many black ones.

Even Herman's solitary commercial and popular success, a 1939 hit called Woodchoppers' Ball, was in essence a jazz piece: an "original" and an instrumental, featuring Woody's blues clarinet, Nell Reid's swing trombone, Steady Nelson's Cootie-Williams-style trumpet, and some nicely swinging riff-ensemble choruses. The transformation into the orchestra that startled the music world in 1945, known as the First Herd, was very gradual, almost imperceptible. Some of the effects of these changes could be heard as early as 1941 in Lowell Martin’s excellent (but too short) Woodsheddin' with Woody, his Ten Day Furlough, Robert Hartsell's Hot Chestnuts -all hard-swinging jazz instrumentals that not only matched the best that other leaders in the field, like Benny Goodman, Shaw and Barnet were turning out, but already captured some of the drive and excitement of the 1945 Apple Honey, Caldonia and Northwest Passage.

Starting with a fairly strong rhythm section of Hy White (guitar), Walt Yoder (bass), and Frank Carlson (drums) and such players as trumpeters Ray Linn and Cappy Lewis, tenor saxophonist Herbie Haymer -only transitionally in the band - Herman by 1943, was hiring Ellington sidemen such as Ben Webster, Johnny and Ray Nance to sit in on his record dates (as well as performing and/or recording, in 1942, two of Dizzy Gillespie's earliest compositions and arrangements). Ben Webster's richly florid solos can be heard to good advantage on such Herman recordings as The Music Stopped (also notable for being singer Frances Wayne's first recording with Herman), Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me, and Who Dat Up There. But even speedier and more dramatic changes were in the offing.

Between late 1943 and late 1944 - a period when the recording ban was still partly in force - Dave Tough joined the rhythm section, the remarkable trombonist Bill Harris came over from Bob Chester's band, tenor saxophonist Flip Phillips (playing in a manner that combined all three major tenor styles: Hawkins, Webster, and Young) joined up, and arrangers Ralph Burns and Neal Hefti began revolutionizing the Herman band's style by moving it firmly forward in the direction of the new bop frontier, the first major white band to do so unequivocally and consistently.

But perhaps the most influential addition to the Herman band was bassist Chubby Jackson in 1943, not necessarily as an all-that-outstanding bass player (although by adding a fifth string to his bass, pitched at high C, a fourth above the usual upper G-string of the bass, he explored some new frontiers of his own in his walking bass lines and solos), but as an energetic catalytic force in the rhythm section, and -perhaps even more important - as a kind of self-proclaimed associate-leader to Woody, ferreting out new young talent and maintaining a lively contact with all that was new in jazz at the time.

What is so remarkable about the Herman band's stylistic transformation, from an eclectic all-purpose ensemble to the best "bop" or "modern jazz" orchestra in the land, is that this metamorphosis resulted from a thorough fusion of several specific early-1940s' style ingredients: the feel and swing of Basic's rhythm section; the fresh streamlined and linear virtuoso conception of brass-writing already articulated by Dizzy Gillespie [We can hear such lines as early as 1942 on Herman’s recordings of Gillespie’s ‘Down Under’] ; and the new harmonic language previously explored by Ellington, Eddie Sauter, Sy Oliver, Buster Harding, and Ray Conniff. The primary synergistic agent in all this was the new post-Swing-Era technical skills possessed by the best young players, relentlessly energetic and virtuosic. This made possible a level of sheer instrumental excitement that was simply not available earlier, except in isolated instances.

These new qualities were effectively captured on a surprisingly large number of Herman recordings, starting with the up-tempo Apple Honey and Caldonia (1945), on through Northwest Passage, Bijou, Blowing Up a Storm (although in the last title the Carnegie Hall performance of March 25, 1946, is superior to the commercial recording in all respects), and Your Father's Moustache, Wild Root, Fan It, Back Talk, Non-Alcoholic, and finally to Ralph Burns's 1946 four-movement orchestral suite Summer Sequence. On the lyric and ballad side there were also major contributions to the genre, invariably arranged by Ralph Burns: notably David Raksin's superb Laura (how well Woody plays and sings on this!); I Surrender Dear, a fine vehicle for Red Norvo's creative artistry; Panacea; Bill Harris's lyric masterpiece Everywhere; and, above all, Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe, with Frances Wayne's sublime singing, surely one of the dozen most memorable vocals of the entire Big Band and Swing Era.

The singer captured the haunting bittersweet quality of Harold Arlen's song with a maturity, vocal imagination, and taste that avoids all cloying sentimentality - even in her copious use of portamenti [singing a sliding pitch to the targeted note] - and that belies the fact that she was only twenty at the time. Ralph Burns's sensitive arrangement, subdued in pastel-colored muted brass and soft saxes (except for dramatic 4-bar double-time outburst), provides a well-nigh perfect underscoring. This extensive repertory, primarily the creation of Burns and Hefti - there more, of course, some of it at not quite as high a level, and some of it not recorded commercially at all - has hardly dated in retrospect. It is as fresh exciting now - even when played today by younger orchestras as "older repertory” - as it was then, over forty years ago.

The reasons are obvious: the Burns/Hefti pieces were really new and original at the time, a striking amalgam of first rate jazz solos (by the likes of Bill Harris, Flip Phillips, trumpeter Sonny Berman,[Berman, one of the earliest Dizzy Gillespie disciples, was developing into an important soloist of increasing originality when his career was cut short in a fatal auto accident at the age of twenty-two] and Red Norvo, supported by a dynamic and indefatigable rhythm section, and orchestral writing derived from these very same fresh improvisatory styles. Secondly, the musicians played this material, night after night, with infectious exuberance, an almost physically palpable excitement and a never-say-die energy. As I say, this partially represented the sheer pleasure of frolic in such high-level instrumental virtuosity. But the band also played with a of pride in its individual and collective accomplishments. And it appreciated, indeed relished the newness of their style's harmonic and melodic language. rich advanced harmonies, the lean, sleek bop lines. The musicians also they were playing for a leader who deeply appreciated their talents and contributions to the cooperative whole.

Some four decades later we tend to forget how new this all was. As a result of the constant recycling since the late 1940s of that genre of big-band style by dozens of orchestras, we tend to take much of it for granted today. We should not forget, however, that there has been very little substantively new in big-band styling since Woody's First Herd, and that the ultimate perpetuation of that style during the last thirty years fell to Count Basie (for whom Hefti arranged for many years). On the other hand, lest I appear to be overstating the case for the importance and influence of the Herman band, two points should be clarified. It was not the full sense of the term a true bop band. Though Hefti, Sonny Berman , Chubby Jackson were enthusiastic disciples of Gillespie and Parker and brought much of the new bop concepts into the Herman band, other players like Phillips, Harris, and Tough (and of course Woody himself) could not be readily aligned with the bop movement. They were "modern jazz" players with roots firmly ensconced in the late-thirties' swing styles.

Thus the 1945 Herman band was only intermittently and/or somewhat exteriorly in a genuine bop mold. The distance between it and the pure bop-styled orchestras -Billy Eckstine's of 1944, Dizzy Gillespie's of 1946, and Oscar Pettiford's short-lived eighteen-piece of early 1945 -can be measured by comparing Herman's Apple Honey, Caldonia, or Back Talk with such pieces as Gillespie's Things to Come and Emanon, Pettiford's Something for You, Eckstine's I Stay in the Mood for You or Blowing the Blues Away. …, the Herman band was not only an early innovator in the new bop or bop-tinged orchestral style, but it committed itself to it with a perseverance and consistent quality not equaled by any other white band of the time. This was due in large measure, as we shall see, to Ralph Burns's arrangements and compositions, and the fortuitous coming together of a young, dynamic, exceptionally talented group of players.

Although all the other major white bands of the 1940s -Barnet, James, Shaw, Ken ton, Raeburn, and a lesser extent Goodman - also drew on a whole fresh generation of arrangers and players, they all adopted the new modern jazz language well after the Herman band had made the change-over. Barnet, James, Shaw, and Raeburn were the first to follow suit, with Ken ton and Les Brown trailing by a year or more. Moreover, except for Herman - and James with his 1945-46 band - all those orchestras retained a high proportion of pop and purely dance repertory. Their conversion and commitment to the idiom was not as deep as Herman's and his Herd. As to the question of who got there first, clearly Eckstine's recording of I Stay in the Mood, with its exciting unison bop lines in the brass and Dizzy's concluding solo, takes precedence chronologically; it was recorded in April 1944 when Dizzy was just organizing the Eckstine band.

On the other hand, the Herman band's Apple Honey and Caldonia , basically head arrangements with some of their bop-ish brass figures supplied by Ralph Burns and Neal Hefti, were performed as early as the summer of 1944 (but not recorded until February 1945). Unquestionably, Gillespie and Eckstine's arranger Gerry Valentine inaugurated the new style on records (already explored with the Hines band in 1943, however not recorded - presumably because of the 1942-43 ban). But Woody Herman, with Jackson's and Hefti's ears close to the ground, picking up the new vibrations from Harlem and Minton's was certainly not far behind. It is also a fair assumption that Herman's enormous commercial success with Columbia Records in 1945 - along with Eckstine's - helped pave the way for the establishment in 1945 of Dizzy's prophetic band (it however did not record tm mid-1946). I have mentioned Herman's appreciativeness of his musicians' talents. But Herman was also a consistently accurate critical judge of talent, and allowed only his most creative players to solo.

None was more gifted than Bill Harris [Emphasis mine], probably the most astonishingly original trombonist of the early modern-jazz era. Blessed with a seemingly unlimited technique, range, and endurance, Harris was at all times completely unpredictable, relentlessly original creatively. Yet he could always be relied upon to capture the essential mood or character of any given work or arrangement. A typical Harris solo could be passionate ( Northwest Passage ), eccentric (the 1946 Woodchoppers' Ball), quirky (Nero's Conception), suave (Bijou), intensely lyrical (Everywhere), fantastical (Fan It), and bop-ishly driving (Apple Honey). Harris's solos were like recitatives, based on some private scenario of his own invention, which at the same time provided his personal commentary -occasionally a mite garrulous - on the work in question. In all of his playing there was an underlying hard-edged humor, a sharp wit which could instantly break out in the most startling utterances. His seemingly unmoving, tough, taciturn outward expression - surely a mask hiding a highly complex serious persona - kept Harris from ever descending to mere sentimentality – save perhaps to parody it.

Even Harris's most extravagant musical expressions can usually be grasped in the light of his strange sense of humor and his penchant for the caustic and the sardonic. His control of musical content was as awesome as his control of technique. His often outrageous use of vibrato, for example was by no means an uncontrolled aberration. It was on the contrary a finely calibrated, specifically embellishmental, expressive technique, always at the precise service of his musical intentions. It could cover the entire continuum from a searingly intense straight tone (no vibrato) to various extremes of vibrato (in both speed and pitch variance) and all gradations in between.[I know of only one other artist who has such consummate control of vibrato, and that is Sarah Vaughan – more precisely Sarah Vaughan of 1987 and the last 15 years or so] Harris also adapted with great effect the so-called "terminal vibrato" (Andre Hodeir's term), developed by Louis Armstrong and trombonists like Jimmy Harrison and Dickie Wells. Harris often carried this effect one step further by stopping notes with abrupt "ripped" kind of release, thereby adding powerful rhythmic punctuations to his phrases that heightened their sense of swing.

[Harris’s countless imaginative solos really defy notation …. They must by heard to be appreciated fully. The relatively “simple” “Apple Honey” solo and the dazzlingly “extravagant” one on ‘Fan It’ are two examples of Harris’s art, suggested for the further-interested reader/listener] Ralph Burns's always outstanding contributions to the Herman book were climaxed in 1946 with an ambitious four-movement twelve-minute work entitled Summer Sequence. Given the precedent in 1943 of Ellington's breakthrough extended-form suite Black, Brown and Beige and Burns's deep admiration Ellington's art, it was perhaps inevitable that, with his composer's (as opposed to arrangers) creative imagination, Burns would be inspired to try his hand at a similar large-scale work. Summer Sequence was mostly composed in the summer of 1946 while on a Long Island vacation sojourn. Its four movements (played without pause) comprise a lively scherzo-like second movement, a quieter lyrical third movement, both enclosed by two outer movements whose central portions use an attractive rhapsodic 32-bar ballad theme.

First stated by the guitar (Chuck Wayne) and further proclaimed by Bill Harris's trombone, this more or less traditional symmetrically formed theme contrasts strikingly with the two inner movements' many “asymmetrical" phrase structures (many of them an uncommon seven bars in duration). In addition, these latter sections abound with a constantly varied instrumentation, resulting in an unusual degree of textural and timbral variety. In these respects Burns was further surveying territory previously explored only by Ellington, Eddie Sauter, and (occasionally) Sy Oliver. In turn Summer Sequence, although never a large popular success - until, that is, its last movement was re-worked into Early Autumn, featuring Stan Getz's famous solo - exerted a considerable influence, in differing ways, to be sure, on such bands as Ken ton's and Raeburn's, through their composer-arrangers Pete Rugolo, George Handy, and Eddie Finkel. Summer Sequence is not without flaws. Some of its transitional passages are commonplace and seem stuck together out of extraneous material not intrinsic to the work; and its ending is weak indeed.

But at its best, the work amply displays the potential for extended-form composition of the modern jazz orchestra, beyond the requisites of dance music. The other work that radically broke through the confines of the traditional jazz-orchestral repertory, Herman's as well as any other, was Igor Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto, premiered by the Herman orchestra in Carnegie Hall, on March 25, 1946, and recorded by them with Stravinsky conducting, in August of that year. The work was scored for Woody's eighteen-piece orchestra plus horn and harp, in effect in a wind-ensemble piece. Ebony Concerto, like Stravinsky's earlier "ragtime" pieces, remains one of the master's more elusive scores, partly because it occupies a no-man's land halfway between jazz and Stravinsky's mid-period neo-classic style; and partly because, due to its stylistic ambiguousness, it is rarely performed convincingly or with much understanding of its special performance needs.

Indeed, it may well be that its fundamental performance problems have yet to be resolved, since even to this day players who can meet the technical demands of this work and at the same time infuse it with the jazz feeling and rhythmic vitality the work cries for - which Stravinsky undoubtedly heard in Bijou, Goosey Gander, and Caldonia - are still extremely rare. They are even more rarely assembled in one place to perform the work.[ In some respects the finest performance of ‘Ebony Concerto’ I can recall to date, including my own attempts as a conductor of the work, was one given in the mid-fifties by Kurt Edelhagen and his orchestra of the South West German Radio (an orchestra, incidentally, which was later led for several years by Eddie Sauter). Certainly the Herman orchestra was not quite equal to the task, typically becoming very tight and inexpressive when, as in this case, the composition seemed to eliminate the basic explicit beat and standard jazz feeling. Woody, with his characteristic honesty and modesty, stated on numerous occasions that the Herman band was not ready for this performing assignment. "We had no more right to play it than the man in the moon," he said.

The critics have never dealt fairly with Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto. Most jazz critics at the time of the premiere and recording were incapable of comprehending the work, casually dismissing it with comments of "not jazz" (or "inept jazz”) and other profoundly intellectual pronouncements, never realizing that what they heard was not Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto at all but rather a poor performance of it. The classical critics, too, for the most part belittled the work as minor Stravinsky fare, generally unable, it seems, to savor its jazz allusions and at the same time apparently even incapable of appreciating its impeccable craftsmanship. (This seems to be the usual critical fate of category or style hybrids). Ebony Concerto certainly does not deserve the status of an inconsequential trifle which most writers have accorded it. Nor could one argue that it ranks with Stravinsky's major works, like Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Symphony of Psalms and The Rake's Progress. It is beyond the scope of this study to attempt to assign the work its ultimate “resting place"; let history and the future render that final verdict.

What is relevant here, however, is that Stravinsky, with his usual unerringly sharp ear, com posed a work which relates precisely to the more experimental, progressive side of the Herman band's mid-1940s' repertory, albeit in unmistakably Stravinskian terms. I am referring primarily to his consistent use of a) major-minor harmonies and melodies-an integral part of Stravinsky's musical language since around 1905-and b) of cross-rhythms and asymmetrical rhythmic patterns. The major-minor ambivalence relates quite naturally to the blue-note tradition of jazz and some of its more modern harmonic expressions, such as "raised ninth" chords or bitonal harmonies, especially the tritonally related ones. [The raised ninth chord is actually a dominant seventh with a flat or “blue” third on top.] This was one aspect of Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto the Herman musicians could hear - or at least should have been able to identify with. …. In Ebony Concerto, as in other Jazz-related works by Copland and Milhaud, Stravinsky was more interested in some of the music's externals, i.e.

the sounds of jazz - its sonorities, the fascinating mutes (Harmon, plungers) and the “effects" jazz musicians could get with them - than its substantive essence and rhythmic spontaneity. It was Stravinsky's loyalty to ragtime that undoubtedly influenced, for example, his life-long inability to understand that jazz was primarily an improvisatory art (ragtime being non-improvised). Nor did he fully comprehend that swing, freedom of rhythmic inflection, and rhythmic spontaneity were all keyed to the creation of a steady underlying beat and pulse. I suspect that Stravinsky in Ebony Concerto abstracted, and used only those aspects of jazz performance that fascinated him. Nevertheless I am convinced that he also felt the drive and rhythmic energy in the Herman recordings he heard, and that he would dearly have loved to incorporate those elements in his work. But he realized, I am sure, that these are precisely what cannot be captured in our notation, and which - I might add - must be supplied in performances of Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto before we can fully appreciate and asses this unique work.

Much more in the central tradition of evolving modern jazz was the work of Herman's small group, The Woodchoppers, formed in 1946, to a large extent to accommodate the talents of Red Norvo, who had just left the Goodman Sextet. Indeed, Herman appointed Norvo as his associate leader of the First Herd band, and put him musically in charge of the Woodchoppers. The group recorded ten sides, of which three were composed by Norvo (in collaboration with Shorty Roger s) and all arranged by him and Roger Woody Herman – Songs & Albums : Napster and 44 other albums About Woody Herman If you see Woody Herman's toothy grin on a CD cover, do yourself a favor and snatch it up. Herman's big band combination of Swing and Bop sounds just as good today as it did when his various ÃÂHerdsÃÂ originally stampeded in the '40s. Herman played clarinet and saxophone and sang in a charming, bluesy voice. He assembled crackerjack bands that featured the likes of Ben Webster, Red Norvo, Stan Getz and Shorty Rogers.

Count Basie took arranger Neil Hefti from Herman and invented his ÃÂAtomic sound.ÃÂ Ray Charles loved Herman's group so much, he used another of Herman's arrangers, Ralph Burns, to launch his own big band. Herman, adored by musicians as a true gentleman, had a tragic end. A crooked business manager was stealing from him, and had not been paying taxes for the entire band over a period of many years. Herman became a slave to the IRS and was forced to tour and play until he died in 1987. Nick Dedina Similar Artists

Question: What instrument did jazz musician, Woody Herman play?
Answer: CLARINET